And Snow Like Acid Tears
by Elske
Summary: Three loves, two nightmares and one dream in the life of Carlton Lassiter.  Shassie slash eventually!  Written as a giftfic for islashlove.


[[&1988.]]

_&I've had my fun and now it's time to serve my conscience_

Carlton Lassiter is an empty shell, and every time he sees his mother's face something like rage, like blind fury, threatens to bubble up inside: but that's quickly replaced by the same numbness that he's been feeling all week long.

He sits in the living-room, on the threadbare gold velvet sofa – a relic from the past decade just like the orange and brown rippled afghan flung across it – ignores the textbook open in his lap in favor of staring, like his father, numbly at the television screen.

A week ago everything was perfect; a week ago he had pulled his best friend (_his only friend_) the love of his life into his arms, laughingly, an act that had become something commonplace in the past two years since their first innocent kiss. He'd straddled Will, felt the roundness of his hipbones under the palms of his hands; his lover pressed open-mouthed kisses to his collarbone and that was when Carlton's mother flung herself into the room unannounced (_uninvited_) and that was when all hell broke loose.

It took three days for Will to come back to school; the next time Carlton saw him, it was with a blackened eye and an arm broken in two places, on account of the fact that Mr Mayfair didn't like queers and especially didn't like the thought that his son was one of them. He'd flinched away when Carlton tried to touch his shoulder, turned eyes cold like fury on him before disappearing into the crowd of students and that, that, _that_ was where the numbness began.

His father says "Book, want some music," and Carlton nods. He still tolerates his childhood nickname from his father, but no one else.

"Yeah, Dad. That'd be great," and his dad switches the channel to MTV.

It's a video he's never seen before: an admittedly handsome shirtless young man in dog-tags doing calisthenics, and Carlton is jarred from his numbness enough to be mesmerized by it. He's so enthralled he jumps when the song ends and his father switches the television off with a contemptuous snort.

"Those kids writing that song, they don't know what it was like," he mumbles, and it's a litany that Carlton is used to. That's about all his father ever does say about the time he spent overseas: Carlton knows that he was a helicopter pilot, that he worked with the chemical corps, and that he inherited his father's army gun on his sixteenth birthday.

"That stuff. They told us it was harmless, but we all knew better," muses Carlton's dad. "We all knew better, if it killed plants, what would it do to birds, to people? And sometimes the wind would shift and it would all spray back at you and it stung like the hottest of tears on your face. Brings the nightmares, a million pretty gook girls crying and all their tears falling like rain made of acid, searing your skin, cooking your innards over a fire." He sighs, gulps down the rest of his drink, rattles the empty ice-cubes in the glass. "Booker. Could you bring me my pills." It's a request thinly veiled as a question and Carlton knows it. "Sure, dad," he says, and he goes off to the upstairs bathroom.

His hands hover over the amber bottles as he finds his father's painkillers and he wonders how many it would take to go to sleep and never wake up. He wonders if his father ever wonders the same thing. He wonders if this is the same kind of numbness his father feels and that's why he doesn't want to talk about it, and if that's the case, he's only been numb a week but his father's been numb since 1969.

Carlton tiptoes past his sister's bedroom so he doesn't wake her from her nap, takes the stairs two-at-a-time, hands his father his pills.

"You're a good boy, Booker," his father says, patting him on the hand. "Don't let your mother…don't let anyone tell you otherwise."

That compliment, unexpected, stings like those chemicals flung into a changing wind. "Thanks, Dad." He scoops up his textbook from the sofa and heads back upstairs, presumably to do his homework, but his mind keeps wandering from the words on the page.

The gun rests in a wooden box under his bed, and it calls out to Carlton, to pick it up, to weigh it in his hands, to wonder how long a bullet hurts when it's put right into your brain.

(That night, he dreams of the snowy winters his father used to tell stories of, back east in Virginia; the snow swirls all around him and burns like napalm everywhere it touches his skin.)

[[&1998.]]

_&open the window and lift into your dreams; lately, baby, you can barely breathe_

There are approximately fifty thousand thoughts swirling around Carlton Lassiter's head: three cases from work and all the details therein, the way the new blonde girl looks at him (and the way he can't help looking at one of the sad-eyed men in dispatch), his father's funeral – leukemia, thanks to Operation Ranch Hand, those chemicals and what he did with them haunting him till the end of his days.

Victoria.

Victoria deserves a category all her own, oh, Victoria.

He thinks he can remember when he loves her. He thinks he can remember when she loved him. But he knows better; knows that all that's held the two of them together in orbit for the past decade was an unwillingness on the part of either of them to admit failure. That's one of the things the two of them have in common, stubbornness.

The argument this night was about children, about wanting them versus not wanting them, and Carlton's attempt to be practical and bring up issues like all the arguing they already did, was this any kind of house to bring a child into, and Victoria's dark eyes blazing _if you didn't want children why didn't you just say so, Carl_, a slamming of doors and another night sleeping on the sofa.

It's almost for the best, Carlton thinks, grabbing the red wool afghan, tucking it around his cold feet, trying his best to stretch out on the slightly-too-small-sofa. His wife can't stand it when he has the nightmares, and he's been having them all the time lately, far too often: so often he almost doesn't want to go to sleep. Maybe late night television will drown it out, and he falls asleep to a commercial for a magical blender.

(And when he dreams, there are glass walls all around, pushing him and Victoria closer together: each of them struggle to get apart, and then, like the inside of a snowglobe: it starts to snow.)

[[2008.]]

_& i'm emptied out, I'm incomplete, you trusted me: I want to show you I don't want to be the hollow man_

Carlton's ranting and raving about something, completely unprepared for what the infuriating (_intoxicating_) Shawn Spencer does next: places one hand on either side of his face, holds him still, kisses him deeply.

And it's been a long time, such _such_ a long time, that Carlton just melts, right there on the spot: a bit of rage gets turned inward but most of it dissolves in lust as he kisses Spencer back and soon the two of them are in the backseat of his car making out like teenagers and when Carlton finally decides they need to go Back To His Place it's all he can do to think clearly enough to drive.

They end up tangled in the sheets of Carlton's bed – far too large for just one person, and the funny thing is that Carlton doesn't want to let go of Spencer: not before not during not after. He falls asleep with the younger man in his arms.

(And when he dreams, the snow is almost blinding but when it touches his skin it's as soft as Spencer's kisses, and Carlton smiles in his sleep.)


End file.
